A few interesting podcasts

...for your perusal.

The Games With Garfield podcast #6: Casual Randomness is an interesting discussion about randomness. And "rando-chess" makes an interesting point, too!

Penny Arcade has been recording and podcasting a few Dungeon and Dragons sessions, with the PvP guy, and Wil Wheaton as additional members of their adventuring party, with a WOTC guy DM-ing. I've linked to the first episode of their latest adventure here.

As you can expect, the actual battles with all the dice-rolling gets pretty tedious to listen to; however, when battles aren't going on (which is usually the first 3rd of the session, and a few breaks between the battles in the middle), it's usually pretty funny. It should also be noted that the DM is also really good at his job here; I've tried listening to other RPG podcasts just for comparison sake, and pretty much determined that he really knows his stuff (as you'd expect from a WOTC employee who I assume was helping develop the new edition of D&D).

What makes this session fun is the way it ends, and is definitely worth sitting through all eight segments for the climatic ending. Which isn't what you think; as the true hilarious capper of the session is caused when the player who is running Binwin the dwarf explains why his character can't die, and Wil Wheaton's response to it.

The Moral Compass

So, life has been getting in the way a lot recently. But I promised that I would update ESNA, and so here it is. The latest version of Epic is up with some rules clarifications, new cards, new quest types, and a new topic to discuss!

(Of course, I should note that I haven't really had a good chance to fully playtest this version. So while I've clarified things that has bugged people, I'm sure that the new added rules have just as many holes in them.)

And on to the topic...

At this point, I need to comment that I am not a student of philosophy of any size or shape, so I'm sure I'm using terms in the wrong way; hopefully the drift of my words is clear.

Dungeons and Dragons used to have this thing called Alignment back in version 1 days, I have no idea what the equivalent is, if any, in today's version. Anyway, it was a compass of sorts that described the way your character should act, making a cross between a Good/Evil axis and a Lawful/Chaos axis.

And in a lot of ways, pretty useless. Since you just played the game the way you wanted your character to play. Or at least that's how we did it. It was a game of heroes doing heroic things, not villains performing evil deeds.

And so, I bring up "morality," or the basic thinking of good actions versus evil actions within a game. This is something that to my limited vision never seems to be covered in games too much. Goals of games are hard wired into "best way to win" or "best way to collect the most points as fast as possible." And while these are all choices that players make, aside from a mere point-collection perspective, there is very little consideration with regards to which path is the "right choice" versus the "evil choice."

Just how far you can veer off the "most point laden path."

In fact, there is seemingly very little outside of RPGs that allow for a player to truly make a moral choice, even down to a simple childlike level of good versus bad. Even in shame such as Battlestar Galactica, where there's a "good" side (the humans) and a "bad" side (the skinjobs), it's not a player's choice; it's merely a card draw of fate that determines your goals.

Then you can take it a step farther; what is really good or evil; one's view of what is good is certainly different depending on which side of the fence you are on. Once you are a Cylon in BSG, getting rid of the humans are a good thing. The victor of a war decides who the patriots are, and revolting peasants are the losers.

So, the next step in this is, is there a way to define a good or bad aspect in a game, derived from a player's choice of actions? Something more than just a logical quest of point accumulation?

What I will contend here is that actions are only decided to be good or evil based on the defining conscience and responses around those actions. In fact, what makes actions somewhat compelling in an RPG is that the NPC, being run by the DungeonMaster, have a memory of how the characters treated them previously. And it is the "memory" of past actions that ultimately define the view of a character's action over the course of time as to whether they are good or evil. Without that memory, there is no justice to return in kind, and no remorse for following a different path.

Or something. As I said, my screw around time has been short. Hopefully this makes sense.

And so, I've imparted some rules into ESNA that attempts to capture this. I've given Settlements a simply memory of past actions where those who live in the Settlement feel they've been slighted by the player, and actions are altered based on those previous actions. Conceptually, I like this a lot; since my playtest time has been remorsefully short, mechanically, I don't think it's implemented as fully as I'd like, and in fact, probably doesn't come into play too much at all.

But it does allow you to go off to rape and pillage an entire Village, at the cost of spreading the news that you are, at best unstable, or at worst, someone that the other Settlements should not be dealing with.

And in some cases, late into the game, pillaging Villages is a good thing for you to personally do; it reduces the cost of building your Keep while gaining some extra gold. If you can live with the crummy reputation throughout the land.

Anyway, it's up for review. I'm always interested in comments and suggestions.

ESNA playtest

Yes, I'm still screwing around with ESNA (Epic Solitaire Notebook Adventures). I just took my first playtest spin with it tonight. Granted, it's a first test, but some notes....

It ran pretty smooth. It ran pretty short, because I got decimated pretty quickly.

As you can see if you click to enlarge the picture on the left, I managed to explore my little Kingdom out to 9 different Regions, eventually meeting my demise in Hillyhills on my return from the dead-end otherwise known as Icabod's Roost due to a particularly strong pair of Armored Snakes. One of the interesting features that developed was that I only drew the "+1" twice; my first use was creating the useless Level 1 Temple in Caroyln, the second use was developing my Village in Alyndale up to a Level 2, since I was watching the terror of continuous hordes of level 1 creatures just CONSTANTLY gnawing on my extremities with every turn.

In general, I felt that the development of the Kingdom went well, with enough "0 Additional Path" cards drawn to make my life a pain to move around in, but not so much that I felt trapped. The Region of Byzantine, Diamonddale, and Icabod's Roost were the Regions that "dead-ended" out; Diamonddale being particularly damaging as it was a central Region, and it canceled out one of my 4 gimme routes out of Alyndale.

Clicking on the left picture here shows my Creature List. Since I didn't even come remotely close to being able to advance to a new level, all of the creatures encountered were also Level 1. Overall, there were 9 total encounters, plus the two Building Advances, and I think a single "no event happens" phase, which leaned against me slightly in terms of expected probabilities.

Early on, I defeated a Flying Kitten, which, aside from a tiny amount of gold, netted me a treasure, so I opted for a +1 Crown of Flying (+1 due to the Kitten being a Level 1 creature, this allows me to add +1 level against all flying creatures during battle) to place upon my pretty little skull. Sadly, the very next encounter, which I believe was against the Armored Dumpling, wound up putting a curse on my crown.

Defeating the Stinky Jackalope netted me the +1 Bodice of Stinkiness (again, +1 level for me against Stinky creatures). But sadly, by this point, even though I increased my village to 2, I was not able to really rescue enough hit points to continue on.

The second encounter of Armored Snakes (which now doubled their damage because there were, well, two of them due to being it's second encounter) did me in nicely.

Finally, I guess as creatures go, even though typically I like my Undead to be zombie-like slow, I guess if they are Undead Rebel Bikers, their bikes would explain their higher speed rating.

As you can see by my character sheet, there's not much to be filled in. Pity the poor nameless wanderer, for nature has run it's course on thee.

Obviously, in one playtest, there's not enough data at this point to determine if "the numbers" are out of whack...but my intuition tells me that the game leans pretty hard into the player (at least at the starting level) at this point, just based on the fact that the encounter/improvement Event occurances are relatively close for a small sample. I started with 50 hit points...perhaps that's not enough to start with.

But I think that the need to advance levels quicker that the creatures can multiply is of prime importance. Also, I was playing with an Initiative rule where when a creature is encountered I would check a Battle Result number from my Level against that creatures speed. Losing that check gave the creature a free hit on Nameless Wanderer, which didn't help.

On the other hand, this is what I assume it felt like playing a 1st level Magic-User in the first editions of Dungeons and Dragons:

"Oh yeah, ok guys, you go off and fight that monster and I'll be huddled in the corner over here, keeping my one stinking Magic Missile around in case we REALLY need, but otherwise, I'll just be right...over...here. Cowering. Occasionally shaking my staff at the the monster."

Too bad this is a solitaire game.